We watched Waco last Sunday night. It was, for me, unimaginably powerful.

Here’s a trailer from YouTube.

In 1993 the ATF got a search warrant for the Branch Davidian headquarters in Waco, Texas, and an arrest warrant for David Koresh, the religious leader of the group, on weapons charges. Instead of serving the warrants, the ATF launched a surprise raid, trying to force entry. There was a gun battle. The raid failed. No one has ever figured out who fired first but both sides blamed the other. The FBI took over, then for 51 days all America watched the Feds fumble the operation. Finally, on April 19 the FBI launched an assault that resulted in the deaths of 76 people, including 25 children and 2 pregnant women.

These events in Waco took place against the backdrop of Ruby Ridge, a similar incident in Idaho six months earlier. That one was an 11-day siege of the Randy Weaver family cabin after Weaver resisted arrest on weapons’ charged. The FBI killed Randy Weaver’s dog, 14 year old son Sammy, and his wife Vicki.

None of these people were particularly warm and fuzzy characters. Randy Weaver was a white supremacist, and David Koresh seems to have turned the Branch Davidian women into his personal harem. They weren’t “nice people” but the bad guys here are the government agents who went after them.

I don’t imagine it’s a parallel that will occur to most people, but I see my early Mormon ancestors in these stories. Joe Smith was a prophet with questionable morals and tactics. He seduced other men’s wives, engineered a ponzi scheme, created a private army, destroyed a printing press when it was used to print an opposition newspaper, and on and on.

Smith was, of course, immeasurably more successful in his own lifetime than either David Koresh or Randy Weaver. Next to Uncle Joe they look like two-bit wannabes. Even so, in the eyes of their contemporaries the early Mormons must have looked every bit as outlandish as the Branch Davidians. And those Mormons didn’t have just one equivalent of the Siege at Waco; they went from crisis to crisis. Everything from the Panic of 1837 to the Haun’s Mill Massacre to the assassination of the Prophet at Carthage Jail and the exodus to the western wilderness.

After watching Waco, I’m reflecting on what makes our Mormon history “sacred history” and Branch Davidian history just some crackpot and his followers resisting arrest?

I think it might have helped that Joseph Smith’s church survived the early setbacks and was fortunate to get some distance from American mobs while it matured a bit under the leadership of Brigham Young. I would be surprised if any of my Mormon relatives think of our pioneer ancestors as being in the same category as David Koresh and the Branch Davidians.

I hadn’t planned to write about Southern identity any time in the immediate future. I decided to do it because of this excellent video by The Cynical Historian. He does interesting work and this one is particularly good.

The video is particularly timely right at the moment, when America is governed seemingly by un-reconstructed Confederates and neo-Nazis. This is not our ancestors’ patriotism.

The basic idea here is that there is a mythology of the South’s Lost Cause, with four important elements:

1. Slavery was good for the enslaved.
2. The issue in the Civil War was states’ rights, not slavery.
3. The North was the aggressor.
4. Reconstruction was designed to punish the South.

If you’re a Northerner, or like me a Westerner taught by the modern equivalent of Yankee schoolmarms, you’ve heard it all before and you’re rolling your eyes. If you’re a Southerner, you want to punch someone—or failing that, maybe just vote for Donald Trump again. (Why the South fell in love with a New York City conman is a mystery to us all. No sense of heritage there.)

One of the things I like about this video is that it is not just a partisan hack job. There’s an element of truth in each of the mythological claims. Cypher takes time to explore. For example, it would be hard to see Sherman’s March through Georgia as anything other than total war (“Northern Aggression”) but at the same time we should acknowledge that Gen. Stonewall Jackson on the Southern side advocated total war from the beginning.

I have some cousins who belong to Sons (and Daughters) of the Confederacy. I qualify for membership but I can’t even imagine joining. They say “Heritage Not Hate.” I say “Heritage of Hate.” And, as an old-fashioned Patriot it’s hard for me to imagine any world where someone could celebrate ancestors who committed treason.

My main take-away from this video is the idea that someone I think is eminently reasonable (Cypher) thinks there might be a good rationale for keeping the public statues to the heroes of the Confederacy. The argument seems to be that we don’t need to destroy history even when we disagree with it. I come at it a little differently. I see no reason to maintain public statues and monuments of any kind if they don’t represent a widespread majority of the population there now. I don’t see that we need to maintain statues that represent only a race and class ascendancy from an era when those people could position their views as “normative.”

At one time I believed the rest of the country is just waiting for the old guard to die off so we can all move forward. Now our national politics have shown there must have been a stronger undercurrent of racism than we imagined.

And that brings me to one of my long-held but definitely minority opinions. We didn’t do ourselves any good fighting the Civil War to keep the South. We should have let them go. By forcing them to stay in the Union, we’ve likely sewn the seeds of our own defeat.

• The Cynical Historian. “Understanding the Lost Cause Myth.” YouTube <youtube.com>, Apr. 16, 2020. Retrieved Apr. 20, 2020.

As a Riccardian, Josephine Tey’s novel Daughter of Time is an old favorite.

Re-reading last night. I didn’t expect it to provide an example of how researchers go wrong.

The story goes like this. Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard is convalescing after an injury. A friend triggers his interest in Richard III and the Princes in the Tower. One of the most famous mysteries in the English-speaking world. Richard supposedly had them killed. It now seems that story was pure Tudor propaganda.

At one point in the novel, a student researcher tells Grant the story of the Boston Massacre. Grant responds by telling the story of the Tonypandy Riots.

Grant says the point of his story is not just “Someone blowing up a simple affair for a political end.” It’s how history has been falsified. “The point is that every single man who was there knows that the story in nonsense, and yet it has never been contradicted. It will never be overtaken now. It is a completely untrue story grown to legend while the men who knew it to be untrue looked on and said nothing.“

When I was an undergraduate I read a similar story about the dangers of oral history. Star-crossed lovers in wartime Yugoslavia who ended up committing suicide. Except both of them were still alive, and the people telling the story knew them, knew their identity, and knew they weren’t dead.

This is the kind of thing we need to bear in mind when doing historical research. Very often it’s the story that matters. Contemporary accounts aren’t necessarily true accounts.

A few pages later, Grant and his researcher decide they need to look at reactions to the death of Edward IV. Tey gives us a great parting line: “Only historians tell you what they thought. Research workers stick to what they did.”

I’d say that’s sound advice for genealogists.

• Josephine Tey (Elizabeth MacKintosh). Daughter of Time. Pocket Books, 1951.

History doesn’t change but our interpretation of it does. It’s all the same events and and the same material culture (as far we can discover it), but when we look back on it we often see different things than our ancestors did.

I’ve been looking for a good example to add to my “toolkit” of elevator speeches, and here it is. Victorian pornography.

We think of the Victorians as being prudish. So prudish, in fact, that we joke about it.

At the same time, it’s pretty clear the Victorians thought it was okay to look at pictures of naked ladies as long as they could be defined as “cultural.” Make it a painting of a naked lady posing as a Greek goddess and you were home free.

Now we have #ArtActivistBarbie and #MuseumActivism. This couldn’t have happened unless our culture changed. Now that it has, our view of the Pre-Raphaelites and Neo-Classicists can also change. We don’t see the same thing when we look back that we used to.

This thing about soft porn disguised as culture makes perfect sense to me. Remember here that I’m an Ethnic Mormon, so I tend to be a bit stricter about some things than the general culture.

When I was a kid we lived in Las Vegas. We were living there when Caesar’s Palace opened. 1966, I think. My parents used to take us out to eat after church on Sundays. Sometimes we ate at casinos. I remember the first time we went to Caesar’s Palace. Pull up, park, and walk up a long path to the front doors. And that path was lined with statues of naked Greco-Roman gods. I couldn’t believe such a thing was allowed in public. (I would have been 10.) My sisters kept their eyes on the ground. My parents didn’t even notice anything was wrong. So worldly, they. That was the day I learned about the hypocrisy of art.

Now, I think I’m go to go follow @BarbieReports and @wmarybeard. There might be something more learn here.

• Nancy Langham-Hooper. “‘That’s not art it’s Victorian porn!’ – how one small Barbie doll took on the art world.” The Guardian <https://amp.theguardian.com/>, Apr. 16, 2020. Retrieved Apr. 17, 2020.

Here’s a guy, someone I watch now and then on YouTube, complaining that White Americans have no culture. It’s hard to know what to make of this. It’s an idea generally associated with White Supremacists, but I don’t think that’s his point.

He says most white Americans lack a sense of culture and a sense of racial or ethnic identity. He says culture is not just behaviors. He’s defining culture as a shared history, shared values, and looking alike.

He sees it as a serious problem. I disagree. Strongly. Where he goes astray, I think, is that defining culture in a way that is not measurable—which is the net result of excluding behaviors. He isn’t defining culture, he’s defining ethnicity then using an undefined set of beliefs and values which are presumably the same across the entire group as a proxy for “white culture”.

But are they really? In my world, the values of my suburban cousins, my cowboy cousins, my Mormon cousins, my Episcopalian cousins, my city cousins, my rural cousins, my rich cousins, my poor cousins, all have significant differences from one another. The culture they share, defined by shared history and shared values, has nothing to do with being White. The culture they are has to do with shared participation in American subcultures. Nothing to do with being White.

Along the same lines, let’s remember that our WASP ancestors found it easy enough to feel separate from and superior to immigrants, even immigrants who are now included under the label “White.” I don’t know anyone moaning about White cultural identity who is willing to face the prejudice White Americans felt toward the Irish, Eastern Europeans, and of course Mexicans. Historically, being White didn’t get you very far if it wasn’t Anglo.

Beyond that, our friend sees consciousness of identity as an essential element of culture. “To know that you share a sense of purpose in life, the same sense of purpose in life, with millions of other people as part of a culture is a glorious thing.” Taken as a whole, he’s not saying White people have no culture. He’s saying we aren’t aware we have a culture.

That’s not my experience, and I don’t believe it was the experience of our ancestors. For the most part, we live our lives inside our culture. It’s as invisible to us as water is to a fish. We become aware of our unique cultures only when encounter different cultures. I am never so aware of myself as a city boy as when I’m visiting country cousins; never so aware of myself as a Westerner as when I’m in New York City; never so aware of myself as an American as when I’m in Europe.

When I think of invisible culture, I also think about religion. This is a connection I’ve smiled about since I was in my teens. If I can see the culture in religion then it doesn’t seem so much like religion to me. I like the cultural element in my religion to be invisible to me. When I go to services at an Episcopalian or Lutheran church, it’s just plain, ordinary church. When I read about or attend a ceremony with Buddhists or Hindus or Neopagans, it something exciting and strange and at least a little bit exotic. The spiritual element gets lost in the “tourism”.

Finally, our friend is missing the element of time. He assumes we belong to the same culture as our ancestors. This is another clue he is confusing culture with ethnicity. It’s easy enough to see we have a different material culture than our ancestors, but perhaps not so obvious that frequently we also have different values.

Very often these differences in values across time end up being enshrined in the politics of liberal versus conservative. Those who are moving on versus those who want the world to stand still. My point will get lost if I choose an example that’s too emotionally charged, so let’s say rodeo. (Not perfect. This is still going to offend people.)

I like rodeo. That surprises most people because I’m politically progressive. We went to rodeos when I was a kid. I continued to go as an adult. After I “came out” I started going to gay rodeos (IGRA). Many of the people I know think rodeo is cruel to animals. The world is changing, and in this case I’m on the cusp. In another generation there might be no rodeo for anyone. When that happens, will rodeo be part of our culture or not? The world will have changed because the values we share will have changed. (And it would be a mistake to see those values as White.)

In the end, I can’t see the argument that White Americans have no culture. First, equating culture with ethnicity is a sleight of hand from the start. Second, culture is something that would normally be invisible to its participants. And third, culture changes over time. All this fretting about the loss of “White” culture isn’t very practical. It’s not grounded in reality.

• Apollonian Germ. “White Americans Have No Culture.” YouTube <youtube.com>, Oct. 27, 2016. Retrieved Apr. 15, 2020.